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The past weekend's box office champion was the Ridley Scott-directed "American Gangster," which whacked Jerry Seinfield's "Bee Movie" at the box office with $43.6 million in ticket sales.

Starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, the movie chronicles the rise and fall of Greensboro native Frank Lucas, who built a crime empire based on heroin sales.

Washington plays Lucas and Crowe his police nemesis.

The key to Lucas's success:He sells a higher-quality "product" -- which he gives a brand name -- for less by eliminating the middle man and dealing directly with overseas suppliers.

Both men follow strict codes of honor -- Crowe as a good cop who is ostracized by other cops for refusing to become corrupt and Washington as an ingenious criminal mastermind who gives out Thanksgiving turkeys to the community even as he pumps heroin into the black community.

There is, as I recall, one scene set in Greensboro in the movie, though it obviously wasn't shot here.

As for my assessment of the movie, the first two acts are excellent. The third fizzled for me.

Still, it is well-made, very well-acted and entertaining.

One wonders what might have happened if Lucas had directed his genius as a businessman to legal enterprises.

Update/correction: The movie apparently got Frank Lucas's hometown wrong. He's from LaGrange, N.C., near GOLDSboro. Same state, different color. Thanks to JR and Susan Ladd for pointing that out.

Newly elected City Council member Trudy Wade cites "incompetence on the part of city government!" in her assessment of city water policy.

In both an editorial today and an earlier news story, the News & Observer of Raleigh cites Greensboro for its forward-thinking water conservation initiatives.

Among moves the N&O praises:
1. Building pipelines to Burlington, Reidsville and Winston-Salem .
2. Pushing conservation in proactive PR campaigns.
3. Taking part in the regional water authority that will operate the Randleman reservoir.
4. Structuring water rates that penalize high-volume users.

The story quotes Jim Morris, director of the state Division of Water Sources, saying: "Greensboro has done everything right."

While there was hardly a mandate to "throw the bums out," as some had predicted, the new Greensboro City Council will be truly new, with the first new mayor since 1999, and four new council members.

Only one incumbent (Sandy Carmany) actually lost in District 5. That leaves a healthy mix of experience and fresh voices.

Change and stability.

Thirty-four-year-old Zack Matheny adds a youthful perspective. (By council standards, he is a baby.)

Former county commissioners Mary Rakestraw and Trudy Wade bring previous elective experience and the promise of tougher questions for city staff (which should be a good thing)

Robbie Perkins briings a familiar new face, since he has served previous terms on the council as District 3 representative.

Always a strong advocate for northeast Greensboro, Goldie Wells has a rookie term under her belt and a firmer handle on the workings of the council and city goverment.

Mike Barber will keep asking why not? (Good for him.)

Sandra Anderson Groat, who surged to mayor pro tem, again, will keep working hard and be (we hope) a little bit more self-assured.

And maybe under the new regime, T. Dianne Bellamy-Small will shed the emotional baggage of the old council and build more positive relationships on the new one.

Mayor-elect Yvonne Johnson has the mother wit, the charisma and the experience to help bring together the parts as a coherent whole, that doesn't always agree, but we hope, will work toward a common vision. She is the first African American mayor in a Triad city and she attracted votes from throughout the city to accomplish it. That speaks well of Greensboro.

Greensboro needs that now, more than ever.

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This week's column.

Newly elected City Council member Trudy Wade cites "incompetence on the part of city government!" in her assessment of Greensboro's water policy.

"The City of Greensboro gambled that there would not be a water shortage and we, the citizens, lost," Wade says in a blazing red, white and blue campaign mailer.

The word "incompetent" is printed in bright red letters for emphasis.

Meanwhile, Jim Morris, director of the state Division of Water Resources, tells the News & Observer of Raleigh, "Greensboro has done everything right" when it comes to managing its dwindling water supply.

So, which is it? Is Greensboro the paragon of water policy or a case study in short-sightedness?

City Councilman Mike Barber agrees with Morris.

While he has issues with some city departments, Barber said Thursday, Water Resources isn't one of them.

"That is truly a department that we can be proud of," Barber says. "(City Water Resources Director) Allan Williams and his team are held up as the best department in North Carolina, if not the whole Southeast."

Barber is a sitting council member. So you might expect him to make such pronouncements.
Yet even a daily newspaper in another North Carolina city agrees. In a recent news story and an editorial, the News & Observer of Raleigh praises Greensboro for its forward-thinking water initiatives.

Among moves the N&O lauds:

• Building pipelines to Burlington, Reidsville and Winston-Salem for water purchases during droughts.
• Pushing citizen conservation in proactive public relations campaigns.
• Taking part in the regional water authority that built and will operate the new Randleman reservoir.
• Structuring water rates that penalize high-volume users.

That's all well and good, Wade said last week, but the city should have done more. For starters, she said, it could have begun building a pipeline from the Randleman reservoir more than two years ago.

Then the city could tap water from that lake, which isn't scheduled to come online until 2011 at the earliest, right now in a dire emergency, she said.

Wade certainly raises a reasonable question. If you're going to have to build a pipeline eventually anyway, why not now? Why not yesterday?

"Go ahead and run the pipeline down to Randleman Lake," Wade said. "I'd like to be sure that when we're in an emergency situation, we'll have water."

Tom Phillips, another sitting City Council member, says such a notion is misinformed and impractical.

"That is so wrong I don't know where to begin," said Phillips, who has represented Greensboro on the board of directors of the regional water authority that oversees the lake and dam since 1992. "She's in left field and you can quote me on that."

A News & Observer story reports that the Black Student Movement at UNC-Chapel Hill is celebrating its 40th anniversary.

The story caught my eye not only because I am a UNC alum, but because I'm also a former head of the BSM.

Yup, as a graduate student in journalism, I led my share of student protests, although we made sure to do our homework before taking to the pavement.

Some people considered the organization separatist, but far from it.In fact, during the time I was chairman (that's what they called it back in those days; today it's president) one of the organization's officers was a white student.

I got to know then-Chancellor Ferebee Taylor pretty well and I'd like to think we built mutual respect for one another.

I also got to know the late Cole Campbell, then The Daily Tar Heel editor, who went on to become my colleague at the News & Record.

And years later I got to know a poor white guy named Alan Johnson, who attended UNC with me (I didn't know him back then) and who got occasional calls meant for me. As I've mentioned in previous columns and posts, Alan and his wife Beverly are my neighbors today (what are the odds?).

My affiliation with BSM led to some funny moments. When I was initiated into a campus honorary some guys in hoods (as was the tradition) came to my room at the Wesley Foundation and solemnly asked where was Allen Johnson.

"Who wants to know?" my protective (and nervous) white suitemates asked.

I appreciated them not giving me up so easily.

North Carolina's misery has company.

Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue led a prayer for rain Tuesday in that similarly drought-parched state, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Couldn't hurt. In fact, it's been done here before.

But Perdue and an Atlanta minister also conceded, in the prayer, that Georgians still weren't doing all that they could do to conserve water.

Said the Rev. Gil Watson, pastor of Northside United Methodist Church:

“We have not been good stewards of our land. We have not been good stewards of our water.”

Perdue added: “We acknowledge our wastefulness. We acknowledge that we haven’t done the things we need to do. Father, forgive us and lead us to honor you as you honor us with the showers of blessing.”

And shower us with the willingness and ability to use the common sense you presumably gave us all at birth, Dear Lord.

To be honest, my initial reaction to the teacher suspended from Smith High School because of blistering words she directed toward her music class was sympathy, not outrage.

Yes, she probably crossed the line in her use of profanity and her threat to "get ghetto" on the class, but she seemed mainly guilty of only trying to give the students a dose of tough love.

I've done that myself more than once in my teaching career. In the long run, so far as I can tell, my students have seemed to appreciate it.

Amid all the words she spoke to the kids these stood out most for me: "I do all this crap because I love you and I care about you and you're going to treat me like this?"

I also appreciate her threat that she'd team with the students' parents to address their behavior.

"You want to see hard?" she said in remarks a student recorded on a cell phone. "I'll get in touch with everyone of your mamas and daddies, and we will get hard!"

Sounds cool to me.

Now I don't know the full context of the incident, which school officials are investigating. But I appreciate the conditions under which teachers are forced to work these days.

She may have erred in her choice of words but I certainly respect the spirit in which she said them.

Update: Here's Doug's take.

USA Today columnist and N.C. A&T faculty member DeWayne Wickham, on whether Barry Bonds's home run record should be accompanied by an asterisk:

"... Baseball officials would venture out onto a very slippery slope if they use that reasoning to stigmatize Bonds' record.

" 'If you want to reanalyze baseball records, the game's biggest offense was that it kept blacks out,' says Kenneth Shropshire, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Sports Business Initiative.

He's right. If baseball is going to start putting asterisks on the records that were aided by the misconduct of people inside the sport, then they should begin with all of the records achieved before 1947. That's when baseball ended its whites-only era."

Read the whole column.

This just in today from A&T Chancellor Stanley Battle:

To the North Carolina A&T State University Family

We have experienced a very difficult football season this year. The review of all athletic programs is well under way. There is considerable room for improvement in all athletics at A&T. I fully support our football program.

A&T appreciates your consistent and continued support for our athletic programs and our student athletes.

Stanley F. Battle
Chancellor

The football team just completed its second winless season in a row. If I were the coach, I'd be more than a little nervous.

I attended the gang forum Monday night at the coliseum.

For reasons still unclear to me, the forum had been postponed because someone had complained that it promoted targeting black youth. That's simply not true.

As was the case with previous forums, the overarching message was that the best antidote to gangs isn't locking people up.

It's baskeball leagues and mentoring programs and summer jobs. It's churches reaching out beyond the pew and the pulpit to help young people.

It's filling the void that make kids seek gang membership in the first place.

If that's targeting black youth, then target away.

Incidentally, at least 50 percent of the attendees at Monday's forum were African American, including the Rev. Greg Headen of Genesis Baptist Church and County Commissioner Skip Alston.

Councilwoman Sandy Carmany, one of the organizers of the event, had backed off on the earlier date after receiving word that the Rev. Cardes Brown of the local NAACP has expressed concerns.

She said she tried calling him. No response.

The News & Record tried callling him. No response.

The Carolina Peacemaker tried calling him. No response.

That's too bad. I'd like to hear his concerns

And I'd like to know if a program like Monday's fine panel had changed his mind.

Our editorial colleagues at the News & Observer lament the contract extension and $291,000 raise that recently went to a losing football coach,, Butch Davis.

You could pay two professors with the raise alone, they say.

And they are right. The big bucks for football say something screwy about priorities. But the truth be told, we want it that way.

It's not only UNC's prioirity; it's ours, too (fans, alumni, students). Or they wouldn't dare do it.

Nothing will change.

This from the News & Record's Web site: The Dudley High School teacher who scuffled with a 14-year-old student on Nov. 13 has been charged with simple assault.

The teacher, Robert Lee Bullard, 59, apparently realized what a dumb thing he'd done from the moment it happened. He resigned later that same day.

But his troubles aren't over.

According to his arrest warrant, Bullard punched the student, Tyrick Glover, in the face.

Bullard was a newcomer. He had been hired in August to teach social studies.

What a sad situation.

Meanwhile, I'm hoping the Smith teacher who told off a class in a well-publicized -- and cell-phone-recorded -- tirade laced with cuss words, gets to return to the classroom.

Even if all of them didn't appreciate it, she seemed to geuninely care about those kids.

The News & Observer reports that Durham has only 59 days of water left.

So the city has upped its conservation level from "moderate mandatory" to "severe mandatory. That means, in addition to an already existing ban on outdoor watering, commercial and residential users are being encouraged to reduce consumption by 50 percent. But there are no penalties for those who fail to comply.

I don't mean to sound flip, but how can restrictions be called mandatory if they only involve goals? For instance, commercial users are only required to submit lists of measures they are taking to conserve.

The honor system.

Meanwhile, a noted expert on sustainable water told public radio's "Fresh Air" Tuesday that the whole country needs to rethink how it uses water. And that if we'd been smart from the startt, we wouldn't have done dumb things such as building big cities in the middle of the desert.

By the way, Peter Gleick, a MacArthur Fellow and co-founder of the Pacific Institute, Peter
also thinks bottled water is a wasteful and unnecessary.

He thinks climate change is affecting the water supply, making dry places dryer and rainy places wetter ... meanng more drought and more floods.

Among Gleick's other thoughts:

The U.S. has done an exemplary job of providing safe drinking water that is generally free of water-borne diseases that still plague most of the rest of the world.

The U.S. uses less water today than it did 20 years ago, "a lot less" per person.

A growing economy needn't require more water consumption.For instance, he says, in the 1930s, it took 200 tons of water to make a ton of steel. In the 1980s it took 20 tons of water to make a ton of steel. Today, it takes three to four tons of water to make a ton of steel.

Today's droughts are caused by: Weather patterns. Climate change. Growing populations in areas with meager water supplies.

It takes three to four liters of water to make one liter of bottled water (that includes the water needed to manufacture the plastic bottle).

Long term it makes sense to stop using drinking water for toilets and irrigation -- to build houses with two sets of pipes ... one with water for irrigation and one for drinking.

To listen to the interview, click here.

I'm looking forward to a Greensboro Police Department retirement ceremony this afternoon in which Capt. William "Tony" Phifer will be among those honored.

Capt. Phifer has worked for the department for 22 years in a variety of jobs, including homicide and vice and narcotics.

He's also my sister's husband.

He doesn't talk much about his police work but occasionally he's shared what it's like to chase a suspect on foot and have to tackle him -- and what's it's like to come upon the nauseating aroma of death.

He also has abiding interest in young people and has been a Boy Scout leader for years. He'll continue to work with young people after he retires as a mentor in a local high school.

I'm proud of his service and wish him and his fellow retirees the very best. They've served honorably and they've served well.

I said I was wrong in a previous post about N.C. A&T football. Then again, upon further review, maybe I wasn't.

Chancellor Stanley Battle had issued this cryptic statement:

We have experienced a very difficult football season this year. The review of all athletic programs is well under way. There is considerable room for improvement in all athletics at A&T. I fully support our football program.

A&T appreciates your consistent and continued support for our athletic programs and our student athletes.

I took that as a sign that heads would surely roll, probably football Coach Lee Fobbs', given the Aggies' two straight winless seasons.

Didn't happen. Instead, Fobbs got a vote of confidence from Athletics Director Dee Todd. I assumed that came with Battle's blessing -- and that the new chancellor had been true to his word that he cared more about his athletes graduating than wins and losses Maybe not that many losses.

Now comes word that Todd has been reassigned to unspecified duties in the School of Education. She said Thursday: "Am I the scapegoat for football?"

Battle is the new CEO. Changes in key positions are not unusual when a new chancellor comes aboard. But the upheaval will take its toll.

A&T has had so much turnover in athletics since 1999 that it's been hard to keep count: six athletics directors, counting interim ADs; three football coaches.

Certainly Battle has the authority and responsibility to put the right people in the right jobs.A&T also needs a sense of stability.

That's missing right now.